This application claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. 119(a) of Korean Patent Application No. 2004-75062, filed on Sep. 20, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a policy-based management method and system for printing eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. More particularly, the present invention relates to a policy-based management method and system for printing extensible markup language (XML) documents, using a policy object defining an access authority for output data and printing layouts, on the basis of user information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become popular as a tool for producing web contents, more companies and service agents create and manage business data, and the like using XML.
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a page description language substituting for a HyperText Markup Language (HTML), being standardized by the WWW Consortium, and is generally referred to as ‘XML’. XML has been developed to optimize a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) for the Internet while extending link functions, for example, used in HTML, so as to have all the benefits of HTML and SGML.
In other words, the XML has a function for allowing a user to define new tags in HTML, as a method for solving the limitation of HTML and the complexity of SGML. Also, the XML, which is a subset having the practical functions of SGML, can be widely used in electronic publication, medical field, management, legal field, selling automation, digital library, electronic commerce service, and so on, as well as on the Internet.
Data defined in XML is processed using the XML that defines the data part of the data and an eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) that defines a description of the data. Here, the XSL is a language used for creating a stylesheet for describing how data transmitted through a web page using XML is shown to a user. XSL provides to a developer a tool capable of designating where and how to display data fields in an XML file. Like conventional stylesheet languages, XSL can be used to define styles of XML documents and also re-used for various XML documents.
In other words, data itself and a method for describing the data are separately created and managed. Recently, as XML-based contents have included a large amount of database managing corporate information or client information, policy-based management for XML data, such as access management and data output layout management, is increasingly required. However, existing XML-based and XSL-based data processing methods are not suitable to process various policies and accordingly CANNOT control and manage such policies independently.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 20040006744 entitled “System and Method for Validating an XML Document and Reporting Schema Violations”, which is incorporated herein by reference, provides a method which detects logical errors for grammatical or specific contexts of XML documents using an internal validation engine. In the U.S. Patent Publication, a policy for automatically detecting errors and defects is described, however, policy-based management for printing of XML documents is not described.